Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Sales of Argentine soybeans are lagging this season due to expectations for higher world prices later and to domestic financial uncertainty that has prompted farmers to save in beans rather than pesos.

With world food demand on the rise, growers in the Pampas grain belt are filling their silos with soy rather than converting their crops into pesos, a currency that hit a new all-time low in informal trade this week.

Considering Argentina’s high inflation, clocked at about 25 percent by private economists, “money in the bank” is not as secure as storing soybeans next to their fields... “We are going to hang onto our soy. One can see higher prices ahead,” said Jose Plazibat, a partner with the firm of Bandurria and Plazibat Brothers, which farms more than 3,000 hectares near the town of Chacabuco in Buenos Aires province.

...Cut off from global bond markets since its 2002 default, Argentina needs farm revenue to help finance public spending increases ahead of October legislative elections.

...Growers say they would plant more corn if the government would stop placing curbs on exports. The farm sector has long feuded with President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who won re-election in 2011 on promises of increasing the government’s role in Argentina’s economy.

Confidence has since softened. The peso has slumped in the informal market, opening a breach of 71 percent versus the formal exchange rate and increasing market chatter about a possible devaluation to shore up exports... The government is likely to put off a devaluation of the official peso at least until the October elections have passed.

Say, perhaps the economic geniuses Paul "Enron" Krugman and Henry "POS" Blodget could explain why massive deficits, financial repression, and currency devaluation didn't work for the Argentinian government, which has only tried their Keynesian policy prescriptions for, oh, about the last century or so.

Perhaps it was because -- like Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- she's a disappointed boxer who had trouble making friends in America.

At a San Jose Starbucks a person tried to leave tainted orange juice for customers to buy.

Thankfully, someone saw something suspicious and reported it before anyone had a chance to drink that juice. Now there's concern this isn't the first time or the last that a woman has tried it.

A customer noticed a woman's odd behavior as she walked in, pulled out two bottles of orange juice and stacked them next to other refrigerated items. After the woman left, the customer told the store manager and the employees noticed a toxic smell coming from the containers so they called in the San Jose hazardous materials team.

One bottle was found to contain a mixture of orange juice and isopropyl alcohol, also known as rubbing alcohol. The other bottle had acetone in it, which is commonly used as nail polish remover.

Surveillance cameras captured the suspect's license plate and police traced it back to the suspect's home in South San Jose where they arrested 50-year-old Ramineh Behbehanian.

No one drank the tainted orange juice and investigators do not believe she did this at any other stores. Regardless, Starbucks says it is checking its bottled beverages at other nearby stores.

Police have not released a motive as to why this woman would want to poison customers, but they plan to hold a press conference on Tuesday morning.

I hear that the surname Behbehanian is Iranian.

But please don't jump to any conclusions and assume that this fragile young dove is an angry Muslim waging Jihad. I'm guessing she's a Tea Partier and a Fox News viewer. Or something.

The web as we know it was famously invented by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN, but it wasn't until a few years later -- 1993 to be precise -- that it'd truly be set free. On April 30 of that year, Berners-Lee's then employer would make the technology behind the WWW available license free, bundling a basic browser and some key chunks of code into the deal.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of this event CERN has recreated the first ever website, complete with its original URL [Ed: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html]. The preservation doesn't stop at copying over some old files, either, with CERN also looking to preserve the first servers used, restoring as much as possible to its original state. Beyond a little geeky nostalgia, the project hopes to safeguard the web's earliest days, before it became the ubiquitous phenomenon it is now, so that future generations can enjoy (and scoff) at the web's origins. Best of all, no drawn-out field trip is required to enjoy the spectacle, you can see it just as nature intended by heading to the source.

Part II of Fox News Special Report into the Benghazi cover-up premiered tonight and the news keeps getting worse.

BAIER: President Obama promised to get to the bottom of the Benghazi attack. Why are the perpetrators still free? Correspondent Adam Housley has part 2 of our exclusive investigation.

OBAMA: Make no mistake. Justice will be done.

HOUSLEY: Seven months and still no arrest or targeted killings after the brutal attack on two U.S. locations in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans -- despite promises that those responsible would be hunted down and held accountable.

However, multiple sources tell Fox News that the U.S. has identified the Benghazi attacker who is still running free.

SO: We basically don't want to upset anybody. And the problem is if Ambassador Stevens' family knew that we were sitting on information about the people who killed their son, their brother, and we could look them as a government in the face, then we are messing up.

We're messing up.

HOUSLEY: Fox News spoke exclusively with this Special Operator who watched the events unfold in real-time and debriefed those who were part of the response.

He remains anonymous for his safety and has decided to talk because he says he and others connected with the September 11th attacks of Benghazi are frustrated with the excuses, lies and lack of a military response since Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

SO: We have all the capability, all the training, all the capacity to kill and capture that only terrorist involved with the specific events of 9/11 and Ambassador Stevens' death with terrorists who are feeding other regions, including Europe that eventually could effect our national security in the short-term.

We're not talking midterm or long term. This is short-term.

HOUSLEY: The community is pretty frustrated?

SO: Absolutely. It's a daily frustration.

HOUSLEY: Another threat, a larger terrorist haven that continues to build in parts of Libya and North Africa. Those working the region in the United States security plainly the ball is being dropped by people at the White House, Pentagon and State Department.

SO: The second highest population of foreign fighters in the war in Iraq came from Benghazi. Second to Saudi Arabia.
So we are talking about historic location and region that has fed foreign fighters to kill Americans and kill other coalition forces the analysts, the intelligence experts that I work with all say the same thing: that if we just ignore the situation, as it presents itself, eventually another invasion will have to take place for us to eventually turn the tide.

HOUSLEY: He says the region also remains a weapons hub. After the overthrow of former leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 which saw massive stockpiles of weapons in Libya move freely across the Mediterranean many cases in Syria.

There are thousands of shoulder-launched missiles called MANPADS, some Americans working the area say they are not allowed to take or even destroy the missiles because they have not been given the authority from their chain of command.

SO: I have come across SA-7's in the hands of friendly forces, meaning, you know, surrogate, military, or police forces that wanted to be handed over and I was unable it to do that because there was no program in place, no government organizations were interested, no special operations organizations were interested.

HOUSLEY: Is it frustrating knowing that these potential friendly forces or friendly people on the ground there were willing to pass along something that could fall into the hands of an adversary and there was no plan in place to do it?

SO: It was frustrating not only for myself but for the men and the guys that I work with. We always talk amongst each other and discuss that, you know, it's probably going to take a 747, a 757 to get shot down in Tripoli for somebody to pay attention though that, which is unfortunate.

HOUSLEY: Bret, looking for a response to the charge, that the possible mastermind has been identified and walking around in Libya.

We reached out to the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon and the FBI. And we received no official response or comment.

Close your eyes and imagine a MANPAD taking out an American or a European passenger jet. Because that's precisely what will happen thanks to the fecklessness, cowardice and incompetence of the Obama administration.

“I’m not familiar with this notion that anybody has been blocked from testifying,” said Obama to a question from Jessica Yellin of CNN. “So what I’ll do is I will find out what exactly you are referring to.”

The President must be the only person in Washington who has not heard about the Benghazi whistleblowers. Congress has been trying to gain access to the survivors of the terrorist attack for months. Indeed, during his congressional testimony on April 21, Secretary of State John Kerry promised them he would make it happen. Well, it turns out the opposite is the case.

This news is of huge importance. We have to understand the systemic and individual failures that led to the deaths of four brave Americans in order fix the problems... However, considering that the survivors of Benghazi have been incommunicado for all these months, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that the potential whistleblowers are allegedly being threatened with career-ending consequences if they speak.

At every step of the way, the Obama Administration has been obfuscating the facts of the September 11 terrorist attack, misleading the public, dragging its feet, and—according to the report released by five House committees last week—trying to whitewash its own security and intelligence failures. Expect fireworks when the whistleblowers finally do get to tell their stories.

A lawyer for Benghazi whistleblowers has publicly stated that the State Department is blocking her client's ability to talk freely with counsel. Over the past two weeks, I have sent four letters requesting that this Administration make information available about how lawyers, who already have security clearances and are representing Benghazi whistleblowers, can be cleared to fully hear their clients' stories. I have yet to receive any response from the Obama Administration.

Even if the President really doesn't know anything about someone wanting to come forward, his position should be that whistleblowers deserve protection and that anyone who has different information about Benghazi is free to come forward to Congress. The President's unwillingness to commit himself to protecting whistleblowers only aids those in his Administration who are intimidating them.

Perhaps the President would agree to a polygraph examination so we can get to the bottom of this. Although the person administering the test had better wear a welding mask in case the box explodes into billions of pieces of shrapnel.

QOTD: "Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. And that’s not ‘elect Democrats.’ Or ‘elect liberals.’ Or even ‘elect people that Barack Obama likes.’ It’s just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don’t have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case.

Barack Obama certainly doesn’t know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He’s so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix.

In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn’t really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people’s buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway." --Moe Lane

Monday, April 29, 2013

The panic buying has subsided. Vendors say that is may have to do with the Senate rejecting an expansive gun control bill. People are no longer as worried about losing their Second Amendment. The Senate turned down this background check. But that doesn't mean that it's over...

Indeed. The Leftist hack disguised as a moderate Democrat -- you may know him as "Joe Manchin", if that is his real name -- is still trying to get himself fired by West Virginians.

West Virginia gun grabber Joe Manchin is not giving up. After the abject FAIL that was his “expanded background check” bill, the Democrat has decided he’s going to keep fighting – desperately – to pass his expanded background check bill that has no hope of actually stopping criminal activity, will cost the taxpayer millions, and will be just about as enforced as the current laws.

“I’m willing to go anywhere in this country, I’m going to debate anybody on this issue, read the bill and you tell me what you don’t like,” Manchin said on “Fox News Sunday,” reiterating his intention to bring his measure back to the Senate floor.

Investigators have found female DNA on at least one of the bombs used in the Boston Marathon attacks, though they haven't determined whose DNA it is or whether its presence means a woman helped the two brothers suspected in the bombings, according to U.S. officials briefed on the probe.

In another development, Russian officials revealed details about contacts between the older brother and suspected Islamist radicals in the Caucasus, including Internet exchanges that led to concerns by investigators that he was trying to join up with jihadist fighters...

...Two Russian government officials said Tamerlan Tsarnaev exchanged notes over the Internet with William Plotnikov, a boxer who moved with his parents from Russia to Canada before joining militants in the North Caucasus. And they said Mr. Tsarnaev met several times in early 2012 with Mansur Makhmud Nidal, an alleged militant from the Russian province of Dagestan and suspected jihadist recruiter. The meetings happened in a mosque in Dagestan's capital of Makhachkala known for its adherence to a puritanical strain of Islam, they said...

...Mr. Nidal died in a firefight in Makhachkala last May after a five-hour standoff that ended with him throwing a grenade at police officials, according to Russian authorities. Mr. Plotnikov died two months later, in mid-July, during a raid in the hinterland of Utamysh, a village southwest of Makhachkala.

Mr. Tsarnaev was in the region at the time of both raids but left Russia for the U.S. three days after the second one. He left before picking up a Russian passport that had been prepared for him at the local migration office in Dagestan's capital.

"He intended to join the fighters, but he lost his contacts," one of the Russian officials said. "In the end he picked an easier enemy in Boston."

Well, it's a good thing Holder Mirandized the (*cough*) "alleged" bomber before his connections could be fully explored. After all, he was talking to investigators until then.

My, my, my. Antique media now faces an interesting dilemma: let Fox News capture all of the Nielsen ratings as Benghazi-gate explodes or attempt to cover it and spin. Either way, they lose:

U.S. Had Assets That Could Have Saved U.S. SEALs

BAIER: The administration has insisted there was no help for the Americans under assault in Libya, none that could arrive in time to change the outcome in Benghazi. Tonight is the first of three exclusive reports charging that claim is just not true.

Because the Special Operator in this piece is fearful of reprisal, we have agreed to conceal his identity. Correspondent Adam Housley has the story.

HOUSLEY: Many Americans are asking indeed, I asked myself. How could this happen? In the seven months since the Benghazi attacks on 9/11, information from the administration has been incomplete at best.

Details and time lines provided by the State Department, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been contradictory and failed to answer many questions.

In December, a State Department review concluded: There simply was not enough time for U.S. military forces to have made a difference: Having said that, it is not reasonable nor feasible to forces at the ready to respond to protect every high risk post in the world.

But members of the military who are monitoring events in Benghazi disagree.

Only a few dozen people in the world know what happened that night and Fox News spoke exclusively with a Special Operator who watched the events unfold and has debriefed those who are part of the response.

SO: I know for a fact that C-110, the UCOM SIF was doing a training exercise not in the region of northern Africa but in Europe. They had the ability to react and respond.

HOUSLEY: The C-110 is a command in extremis force... a 40-man SPECOPS force capable of rapid response and deployment, specifically trained for incidents like the attack in Benghazi. That night, they were training in croatia just three and a half hours away.

SO: We had the ability to load out, get on birds, and fly there at a minimum stage. C-110 had the ability to be there, in my opinion, in four to six hours from their European theater to react.

HOUSLEY: They would have been there before the second attack.

SO: They would have been there before the second attack. They would have been there at a minimum to provide a quick reaction force that could facilitate their exfill out of the problem situation. Nobody knew how it was going to develop.

And you hear a whole bunch of people and a whole bunch of advisors say hey, we wouldn't have sent them there because the security was unknown situation.

HOUSLEY: No one knew that?

SO: If it's an unknown situation, at a minimum you send forces there to facilitate the exfill or medical injuries.

We could have sent a C-130 to Benghazi to provide medical evacuation for the injured.

HOUSLEY: Our source says many connected to Benghazi feel threatened and are afraid to talk. So far confidential sources have fed some information but nobody has come forward publicly on camera until now.

SO: The problem is, you have got guys, in my position you have got guys in Special Pperations community who are -- still active and still involved.

And they would be decapitated if they came forward with information that could effect high level commanders.

HOUSLEY: Despite the concern, our confidential source says the community feels there was a betrayal. All the way to the top. And that people on the ground in Benghazi were left to fend for themselves.

SO: I don't blame them for not coming forward, you know. It's something that is a risky, especially in a profession to say anything about anything in the realm of politics or that deals with policy.

HOUSLEY: Our source provides insight into how the U.S. government and military reacted from the moment the attack began through the immediate hours after ambassador Chris Stevens went missing. What they were told to do and what not to do as Stephens, Diplomatic Officer Sean Smith and former Special Operations members Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed.

SO: There is a lot of responsibility and onus that needs to be taken up and accounted for.

HOUSLEY: The attack began on September 11th, 2012 at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi and culminated roughly seven hours later at a second location, a CIA annex about one mile away.

While the official responses from Washington have been that the assets could not have made it from benghazi in time that killed Woods and Doherty, there were at least two military units that could have made it in time including the one training in Croatia.

SO: Besides those guys who went in on their own, we had two more assets that could have been there. Two more assets that could have been on the ground. It's frustrating, upsetting especially being in the community. The hardest thing to deal with in any kind of, you know, dangerous scenario or gun fight, is, you know, we always look to each other to help each other and that's how we get through situations. It's not about the assets overhead. It's about the guys on the ground.

HOUSLEY: He also says as the attack began there were at least 15 Special Forces and highly skilled State Department security staff available in the capital Tripoli who were not dispatched even though they were trained as a quick response force.

Meantime, a group of American reinforcements also in Tripoli, which included the CIA's global response agent Glen Doherty and seven others took matters into their own hands. This is a little known fact which contradicts the State Department'se report. The team commandeered a small jet and flew to Benghazi while still under fire. Doherty would eventually be killed on the roof along with his friend Tyrone Woods.

SO: These men deserve the highest medal of honor for their action. If it wasn't for that decision we would be looking at different situation. 20-plus hostages... captured by AQ or you would be looking at a lot of dead Americans dead in Benghazi.

HOUSLEY: We have heard some of these same details from a number of our other sources who have not yet come on camera.
Some of our British sources on the ground that night confirmed. Tomorrow, more of our exclusive interview including the hunt for those responsible or the lack of a hunt.

At least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I'm not talking generally, I'm talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”

Toensing declined to name her client... However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators considered relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to the attack, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded, and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials incorrectly described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.

“It's frightening, and they're doing some very despicable threats to people,” she said... Federal law provides explicit protections for federal government employees who are identified as “whistle-blowers.” The laws aim to ensure these individuals will not face repercussions from their superiors, or from other quarters, in retaliation for their provision of information about corruption or other forms of wrongdoing to Congress, or to an agency’s inspector-general.

Spread this story far and wide. It's time to break vintage media's embargo.

It's time to drag John Boehner out of the bar, wake him up, and name a Special Prosecutor.

Talk about Yogi Berra's famous line, “It's deja vu all over again”: have you noticed the similarity in the mainstream media's portrayal of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and that of Trayvon Martin? In both cases, the media blasted a much younger angelic photo of each young man, in essence, misrepresenting who they were at the times of their suspected crimes.

Dzhokhar received his Miranda warning and lawyered up with appointed federal public defenders. Liberals are all over the airways and the internet working to soften Dzhokhar's image, calling him a kid and a confused victim of his older brother and an unfriendly America. At the earliest, Dzhokhar's trial will be a year from now.

My concern is that by the time Dzhokhar goes on trial, the mainstream media and the left will have made his trial all about America's Islamophobia, racism and policies which have caused the world to hate us – forgetting about justice for those who lost life and limb because of the bombing.

Remember what happened in the O.J. Simpson trial? O.J.'s attorneys, praised by the left, masterfully changed the subject of his trial from being about a man almost beheading his wife and the mother of his children to being about America's history of racism against blacks. Remarkably, sympathy and justice for Nicole Brown Simpson somehow got lost in the shuffle of left-wing political narrative.

I foresee a strong possibility of a similar outrageous and tragic scenario unfolding for the victims of suspected terrorist Dzhokhar; murdered were eight-year old Martin Richards, Krystle Marie Campbell – 29, Lu Lingzi – 23, and 27 year old Officer Sean Collier who was shot in the head execution-style while sitting in his patrol car. Fourteen people lost all or part of a limb. Two hundred and fifty people were injured.

It would appear that the mainstream media are well on their way instilling the narrative that we must understand and sympathize with the 19-year-old suspected terrorist. We must not allow the victims of the Boston bombing to be relegated to background players, cast as mere collateral damage of the Left's golden opportunity to sell their narrative that America is always the “bad guy” at fault – the greatest source of evil in the world.

QOTD: "As Thomas Gordon wrote long ago in Discourse X of his 1753 publication, The Works of Tacitus with Political Discourses:

“Wars beget great Armies; Armies beget great Taxes; heavy Taxes waste and impoverish the Country “

Just substitute ‘Welfare’ for ‘Wars’ and the argument remains in full 260 years later And, since you ask, evidence of real ‘austerity’ remains elusive...

...If nothing else, today’s debt stands as a testimony to economic incomprehension and political stupidity on a tremendous scale. But then again, since we are supposed to be drawing all of our lessons from what the Americans did in the 1930s, it is no surprise that we, too, have managed to perpetuate our misery, as did the monetary cranks and bureaucratic meddlers of FDR’s crackpot Brain Trust, way back then." --Sean Corrigan

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Five years after its housing boom turned to bust, Spanish unemployment hit a record high of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. It's almost too horrible to comprehend, but 19.5 percent of the total workforce has not had a job in the past six months; 15.3 percent have not in the past year; and 9.2 percent have not in the past two years. You can see this 1930s-style catastrophe in the chart below from the National Statistics Institute.

...the real story of the Spanish depression has been the story of the indignados: the mostly young, long-term unemployed. It's a bit hard to see just how dramatic it's been in the chart above, so I converted it to a line chart below. Almost all of the increase in unemployment since 2010 has been due to the increase in long-term unemployment of two years or more...

In other words, unemployment is a trap people fall into, but can't fall out of... That is what a permanent underclass looks like.

This debt-fueled madness will, of course, end in war and misery -- as it has throughout human history.

This was the week when Virgin Media was forced to grovel publicly after a deceased man's family posted the firm's demand for a £10 "late payment" when his direct debit was denied because of his death.

The new bill clearly states that the direct debit was denied because the payer was deceased, but that didn't stop Virgin from tacking on the late fee. The man's son-in-law, Jim Boyden, posted a picture of the bill on Facebook, which has since gone viral, and had a few choice words for the telco:

I'm really sorry for my father-in-law not paying his bill last month, but what with him being dead and all, it's probably slipped his mind. Some people, eh?

You, however, are to be publicly commended for swooping in with all the sensitivity of a charging rhino and instantly fining him an extra ten pounds for having the unheard of nerve to be dead and therefore being unable to pay you (some people really have no idea of priorities do they? It's your profit first, THEN anything else. The cheek!).

Boyden added that whatever his father-in-law is up to in the afterlife, watching TV on his Virgin subscription probably wasn't on the list:

I might pay it if you can prove to me he's been watching any of your channels in heaven, but given that British Sky Broadcasting is beamed in directly from the clouds I think he's much more likely to be enjoying that. Your infernal cable pipes seem only to come up from the ground (same location as Hell - spooky coincidence) where I imagine you train people in the art of customer service.

I am bitterly disappointed in your attitude, probably automatically generated by machine and unchecked by any caring human heart. The only saving grace is that my father-in-law had an excellent sense of humour and is probably laughing his arse off about this as we type, giving you the Vs, waving ten pound notes around, planning to haunt you and enjoying the content of Sky TV.

Pigford, you may recall, was first exposed by Andrew Breitbart and because of it he was sued, dismissed and lampooned by the Democrat-Media Complex. The term vindication was invented for situations like this.

In the winter of 2010, after a decade of defending the government against bias claims by Hispanic and female farmers, Justice Department lawyers seemed to have victory within their grasp.

Ever since the Clinton administration agreed in 1999 to make $50,000 payments to thousands of black farmers, the Hispanics and women had been clamoring in courtrooms and in Congress for the same deal. They argued, as the African-Americans had, that biased federal loan officers had systematically thwarted their attempts to borrow money to farm.

But a succession of courts — and finally the Supreme Court — had rebuffed their pleas. Instead of an army of potential claimants, the government faced just 91 plaintiffs. Those cases, the government lawyers figured, could be dispatched at limited cost.

They were wrong.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.

The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud...

The compensation effort sprang from a desire to redress what the government and a federal judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agriculture Department. But an examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion...

...From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie: because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm. Agriculture Department reviewers found reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination...

...But critics, including some of the original black plaintiffs, say that is precisely what the government did when it first agreed to compensate not only those who had proof of bias, but those who had none...

...[For example, in] 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and North Carolina, the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million...

...Acting Associate Attorney General Tony West, who supervised the civil division and oversaw the handling of the cases, canceled an interview. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. also declined to comment...

Like Operation Fast and Furious and Benghazi, the Pigford Scandal is a hundred times worse than Watergate. It represents institutionalized corruption and theft orchestrated by the President of the United States.

It is, in effect, a form of stealth reparations executed unlawfully on the part of this administration.

Heads should roll and impeachment should be on the table. Knowing the cowardly, feckless House Republican leadership, however, it's likely all of this will be ignored because John Boner and Eric Cantor are more interested in retaining their white-knuckled grip on power than doing the right thing.

Kudos to The New York Times for covering this blatant, open ripoff of the American taxpayer.

I have previously noted my skepticism of claims. To me, it wasn't too surprising that the Senate voted down the gun control bill about 10 days ago. My concern is that people were really just being asked about whether they wanted to keep criminals from getting guns, not about the particular legislation being voted on by the Senate. Well, now there is another poll by the PEW Research Center that I think is much more accurate. It asks people whether they are happy that the Senate gun control bill was stopped. Apparently, both Republicans and Independents are generally happy that it was stopped. My guess is that Republicans should pay a lot more attention to what Independents and Republicans wanted than Democrats who wouldn't never have voted for the Republicans anyway. It looks to me that Republicans voted the way that there constituents wanted. So Republicans shouldn't really care that among all voters the poll showed support of 47 to 39 percent. They should look at the results by political affiliation.

Many, such as the New York Times, paint a picture of Senators [like Max Baucus] who both simultaneously opposed the will of 90 percent of their voters and at the same time quake in fear of the NRA... Note in Baucus' case, he is retiring and yet he still voted against the so-called "universal background check" bill. Might [the Times'] Mr. Nocera re-examine his piece?

By the way, the Nate Silver analysis of how Senators would vote on the Manchin-Toomey bill has sone major problem, he uses a very unreliable measure of gun ownership from Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. If you use a bad survey, you get a lot of noise and it makes it more likely that you won't get a statistically significant result. I also like the way he runs a regression after the fact rather than predicting how people were going to vote before the Senate vote. Letting him play around with different factors (we have no idea how many regressions that he ran before he decided to report the one that he did) makes the predictive power of that regression pretty useless.

QOTD: "The Tsarnaevs’ mom, now relocated from Cambridge to Makhachkala in delightful Dagestan, told a press conference the other day that she regrets ever having gotten mixed up with those crazy Yanks: “I would prefer not to have lived in America,” she said.

Not, I’m sure, as much as the Richard family would have preferred it. Eight-year-old Martin was killed; his sister lost a leg; and his mother suffered serious brain injuries. What did the Richards and some 200 other families do to deserve having a great big hole blown in their lives? Well, according to the New York Times, they and you bear collective responsibility. Writing on the op-ed page, Marcello Suarez-Orozco, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Carola Suarez-Orozco, a professor at the same institution, began their ruminations thus:

“The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.' Alternatively, the above opening sentence should “prompt Americans to reflect” on whether whoever’s editing America’s newspaper of record these days “does an adequate job” in choosing which pseudo-credentialed experts it farms out its principal analysis on terrorist atrocities to." --Mark Steyn

Saturday, April 27, 2013

I respect Marco Rubio. I supported him in his Senate run. Most importantly, I believe he means well.

But the allure of power has proven too strong for him. Ensconced in the Beltway Bubble, Rubio's fallen for what I call "the legislation delusion". Roughly translated, it is the belief that complex, multi-faceted legislation can solve humanity's problems.

Obamacare is the quintessential example of law run amok: it represents tens of thousands of pages of regulations, arbitrary thresholds, segmentation of families into static classes, and other symptoms of a master planner's delusions.

What the Statist terms "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" is similarly -- and fatally -- flawed. It represents dizzyingly complex regulations, dependent upon arbitrary conditions, restrictions, and dictates all requiring millions of pages of flowcharts. It is the product of the proverbial "Mastermind": one who believes he or she can better orchestrate mankind than the entirety of the civil society.

And, as history has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, Masterminds must always turn a blind eye to the financial ramifications of their plans. One need only review the cost of Amnesty.

The cost of amnesty: $999 billion. The cost of attrition by enforcement: as little as $14 billion. Amnesty would cost up to 70 times as much as enforcing existing law.

$999 billion cost of Amnesty (Mass Legalization)

Source: The Heritage FoundationSummary: The Heritage Foundation issued two studies in 2007 pointing out that the big problem with mass legalization is that (a) most illegal aliens are low-skilled and therefore do not earn enough money to pay enough taxes to cover the government benefits they receive; and (b), amnesty would eventually make them eligible for the full array of welfare and medical benefits offered by local, state and federal governments. They found the cost of allowing illegal aliens to remain in the United States, and eventually to become citizens, would be $3.7 trillion through the year 2056. That works out to a present cost of $1 trillion, at a 5 percent discount rate. In other words, immediately upon passage of an amnesty bill, the United States government would need to put $1 trillion into an investment earning 5 percent per year if it were honest about paying for the costs of amnesty.

$14 billion cost of attrition through enforcement option #1.

Source: Congressional Budget office Estimate for H.R. 4437.Summary: This option is the bill H.R. 4437 sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner that passed the House of Representatives in 2005. This bill would have been so effective in combating illegal immigration that some 1 million illegal aliens marched in cities around the United States on May 1, 2006 to protest it. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would cost $1.9 billion over the 5 years 2006-2010, which we extrapolate out to the year 2056 using a linear model to account for cost increases. Then we use a discount rate of 5 percent to bring the future costs back to a single present cost figure. The resulting cost was actually $13.5 billion, which we round up to $14 billion to facilitate comparison to the other cost figures.

$177 billion cost of attrition through enforcement option #2.

Source: Congressional Budget Office Estimate for H.R. 4088.Summary: This option is the SAVE Act (Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act) that was introduced in the House of Representatives in 2007. This is a strong attrition through enforcement bill. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would cost $40.7 billion over the 10 years 2009-2018, which we extrapolate out to the year 2056 using a linear model to account for cost increases. Then we use a discount rate of 5 percent to bring the future costs back to a single present cost figure.

We conservatives are immigrants. We are first-generation immigrants or the descendants thereof. But we, as opposed to those whom the "Gang of Eight" would legalize, have followed a lawful process. We and our forebears have come to America's shores through Ellis Island and other ports of entry, applied for citizenship, and have become the law-abiding citizens that have shaped the country.

That is not what "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" represents: it instead grants legal status to those who have broken the law, stolen their way into the country without background checks, without any vetting of their connection to drug cartels or terrorism, and without even a modicum of examination.

There is only one acceptable response to the Gang of Eight's master plans. Seal the border, prove it is sealed over a substantial period of time, and then -- and only then -- will the American people countenance "amnesty" or whatever term the Statist uses to describe legalized lawbreaking.

Police in Utah were in for a shock when they spotted an erratic driver recently. After following the white Dodge Intrepid for a spell, the pursuing officers watched as the driver parked the car, jumped from behind the wheel and ran into his father's house. Standard fare, you say? Not quite.

The driver was actually a seven-year-old boy who had pilfered his dad's keys to skip out on going to church. The officers opted to let the parents handle disciplining the youngster rather than subject him to the legal system, but cautioned the dad to keep his car keys in a more secure location in the future.

Good call.

You can check out video from the chase for yourself... The police say the kid did a pretty good job of keeping the car under control, but did run one stop sign. As Ricky Bobby would say, "I wanna go fast."

How come girls never engage in these kinds of capers? Why is it always boys?

BEL AIR, Md. – A burqa-wearing man pretending to be a woman is in police custody after an armed robbery and dramatic police chase Friday afternoon.

Police say around 3 p.m. Harford County Sheriff’s deputies were called to Third Base Liquors on South Fountain Green Road in Bel Air for a report of a robbery. When officers arrived witnesses told them a man wearing a burqa covering his entire face except for his eyes entered the store and asked the clerk about beer.

Police say the man altered his voice to sound like a woman and chose a case of beer. As the clerk leaned over to pick up the beer the fake lady flashed a gun and announced a hold up.

The clerk gave the burqa-wearing female impersonator an undisclosed amount of cash and the robber left the store and jumped into a white SUV.

Police say an alert passerby noticed something strange, copied down the tag number and reported it to authorities. A short time later police saw the SUV on Rt. 40 at Rt. 755 in Edgewood and attempted to stop it. As the Divine wannabe fled west on Rt. 40, he clipped a car and lost control. The man was critically injured and taken to Shock Trauma for treatment.

The driver has not yet been identified and detectives are investigating if this robbery was connected to an armed robbery that had occurred earlier today in the 2400 block of Churchville Road in Bel Air. Witnesses in that case also reported a white SUV as a suspect vehicle.

In the queue at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment. The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

He was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that old lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Papa B adds, "Remember: don't make old people mad. We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to piss us off."

Attorney General Eric Holder told MALDEF, the Mexican American Defense and Educational Fund on April 24th, that he believes illegal aliens have a “civil right” to be put on a path to US citizenship.

HOLDER: Creating a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country is essential. The way we treat our friends and neighbors who are undocumented – by creating a mechanism for them to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows – transcends the issue of immigration status. This is a matter of civil and human rights. It is about who we are as a nation. And it goes to the core of our treasured American principle of equal opportunity.
It’s also about the law and whether it and our sovereignty mean anything or not. Holder answers in the negative — they don’t. Anyone anywhere in the world can come here by hook or by crook, and crooks like Holder will make them citizens.

Consider the import of an Attorney General refusing to enforce our nation's most important laws: those underpinning equal protection, national sovereignty and national security. We have a government that intentionally ignores its own laws in pursuit of centralizing more power. There's an adjective for governments like this: tyrannical.

Had we statesmen or real leaders running the House of Representatives -- not clownish, cowardly buffoons like John Boehner and Eric Cantor -- Eric Holder would have been impeached long ago.